ONE IN A MILLION

Anyone who has ever seen an X-ray of a chicken (I do it recreationally) is struck by its similarity to the human skeleton. It's a fact of life that our two skeletal structures are virtually identical.

Those already having trouble believing humans evolved from apes must find no comfort in being built like a chicken. This, however, may explain how the Lord rose from the dead. But I digress.

Chickens are something you make soup out of. Not relatives. No one, except at baseball games, wants to dress up like a chicken. Yet the skeletal resemblance is striking.

Now, it gets worse. According to the New York Times, scientists studying the chromosomes of fruit flies (genus drosophila) have discovered that they share 90% of our DNA. A chicken is one thing, but a fruit fly? Even I'm a little offended by that. What the Hell was God thinking?

But it gets even worse, still. Those same scientists studying fruit flies are focusing on the bacteria in people's stomachs and they have discovered that those germs that aid in digestion share huge amounts of DNA with their human hosts. Oh, the humanity!

And get this. Yeast. I am so sorry! Yes, yeast, which leavens our daily bread--- you got it. Call it Uncle Yeast.

Look, I'm really sorry. This wasn't my plan. I wanted to stop with apes. But God has this wicked sense of humor.

I wish it didn't get worse, but it does. Evolutionary scientists are now thinking that the human being is not a singular entity at all, but millions of coordinated, symbiotic organisms working in tandem -- like a string of laptops forming a supercomputer. Each of us is a colony of individual organisms struggling to cooperate with one another for the greater good.

We are, in effect, an ambulatory reef. Wow. This explains the rough patches on my elbows.

Is this reef madness? I foresee a showdown at the OK coral. The Pope isn't going to like this crap one bit. It turns out we didn't just crawl out of the primordial soup. We are the primordial soup: The Creature(s) From the Green Lagoon.

You, as an individual, are not really a "being" at all, but billions of beings, lesser creatures, all working in concert. Wait 'til Jerry Falwell catches wind of this!

A word of caution. Try not to think of any of this when getting frisky with the spouse. Hey, as long as it looks good, who cares if your loved one is actually thousands of smaller creatures? A little candlelight. A little music. No need to visualize a bucket of worms. Unless you're into that kind of thing.

Look, Mr. Scientist. I'll be a good boy. Let's leave the similarities at the fruit fly level, okay? I need to be somebody--not some ad hoc compendium of organisms.

I (or should I say "we"), want to be somebody; to have purpose. We want to transcend this Earth, not die with it. I think all my parts can agree on this. Anyway, what do scientists know? No piece of coral with a biology degree is going to define me.

One surprising result of the DNA comparison studies is that, because of our shared, mitochondrial traits with chickens, fruit flies, bacteria, and yeast, drugs that work on us, work on them as well. Sleep aids, like Ambien, help insomniac fruit flies. Alcohol interrupts the circadian sleep cycles of both humans and yeast. Rogaine works great on apes--not that they need it. And, if you want an inexpensive chandelier, Viagra works wonders on octopuses.

Now that I'm a walking, talking microbe cooperative, I finally know where all those little voices in my brain are coming from. And like Americans as a whole, my legions of organisms are evenly divided as to whether they want to believe in evolution. Some, in the Pitt of my stomach would clearly rather be on Angelina Jolie. But we digress.